Mariella Frostrup: Eat your way to a healthier menopause

Exuberant, encouraging and colourful, ‘Menolicious’, by Mariella Frostrup and Belles Berry, is packed with recipes fornutrient-rich meals designed for a healthier midlife plate

A recipe from Menolicious: Eat Your Way to a Better Menopause by Mariella Frostrup and Belles Berry. Published by DK RED Menolicious

A new cookbook for menopausal women has been co-written by no-nonsense Irish-Norwegian journalist, presenter, and campaigner Mariella Frostrup and chef Belles Berry.

Menolicous: Eat Your Way to a Better Menopause is a colourful and accessible collection of recipes to maximise women’s nutrition at a time in life when a lot is changing. On the phone from Britain, Frostrup said she realised during perimenopause that she needed to overhaul her own diet.

“Having gone through it myself and recognising, during all of the madness around perimenopause…there are a couple of things that you can actually take control of. One is obviously fitness, and — even if you are one of those people who either can’t or don’t want to take HRT — you can do a lot for your health with exercise. And the other thing is, obviously, food.

“There are certain things that our bodies just don’t process as well any more, sugar being a major one, and refined flour. So why keep shovelling in things that don’t agree with you and don’t make you function at your best capacity at a time when you really need to be feeling as good as you can?

“I love food, and I’m very greedy. So, for me, making sure that it’s full of good stuff is really important, because, otherwise, I’d be the size of a whale.”

Frostrup is keen to stress that eating from Menolicious “is not going to get rid of all your menopause symptoms. I’m not giving false promises, it’s not menowashing”, but it’s an important part of a midlife toolkit.

“We all know, when we’re facing challenges in life,” she says, “the stronger you feel within yourself, both physically and psychologically, the easier it is to face those challenges. And I think, in that way, food becomes a no-brainer. The main reason we wrote the book was because we wished that there’d been a cookbook around when both of us were going through those [hormonal] changes.”

A recipe from Menolicious: Eat Your Way to a Better Menopause by Mariella Frostrup and Belles Berry. Published by DK RED Menolicious

The recipes were written by Le Cordon Bleu-trained Berry, “the chef in our partnership”, after the duo met on World Menopause Day in 2022. “I think Belles had always wanted to do a book with her mother [Mary Berry],” says Frostrup.

“Belles was waiting patiently for her mother to retire and realised, as she [Belles] hit 50, that was never going to happen. So if she was going to do it, she had to get on with it. It’s one of those galvanising menopause stories, because it is about getting to this point in life and thinking, ‘OK, what am I going to do next?”

Menolicious was the answer. “The things that were real priorities for us,” says Frostrup, “were, firstly, that it was an exuberant, encouraging book, because, again, so much around this period of life is sort of downbeat and lavender-scented and it all feels a bit like you’re going into retirement on a rainy day. Secondly, we wanted it to be delicious — hence the title — and to give a sense of joy.

“And, thirdly, we wanted easy recipes, because, frankly, I don’t think that women are busier at any point in their lives than they are at this [midlife] point. Many of us are working. Most of us still have kids in our orbit, and then you’ve got ageing parents and in-laws.”

Menolicious: Eat Your Way to a Better Menopause by Mariella Frostrup and Belles Berry. Published by DK RED

With the help of dietitian Hala El Shafie, the book is a collection of tempting recipes that can be made within limited time constraints, incorporating nutrient-dense foods with plenty of calcium, vitamin D, protein, and healthy fats, alongside phytoestrogen-rich linseed and pulses.

Sometimes, it’s a matter of making simple switches and focusing on whole grains, lentils, seeds, and vegetables for meals that will appeal to all the family.

“From a personal point of view,” says Frostrup, “it was great to reboot my interest in food. It’s really about changing things up a bit, adding a few, maybe, surprising ingredients. I love the coconut chicken and black bean stew. I have the timing of this down to 17 minutes now, myself and Belles are in constant competition. And the thickening agent is one of those old, miserable avocados you end up with in the fridge.

“You mash it up and mix it in. So it’s things like that that are adding goodness, but not in a way that’s daunting.”

Putting menopause nutrition in the general cookbook area of a bookshop has been a delight for Frostrup. “I love the fact that it’s not relegated to a dusty shelf with five tomes on it that say’ women’s health’,” she says.

“My one hope is that Menolicious is part of the whole process of normalising menopause and midlife for women and saying, ‘This is nothing to be ashamed of, let’s embrace it with gusto.’”

What Mariella Frostrup has learned about enjoying Christmas while still supporting her hormones

• Balance: “Christmas is not a time for abstinence. That’s the first thing to say. It’s all about balance. If you spent three days inside eating chocolate and drinking too much wine, then have three days where you kind of change it up a bit and have a noodle salad with your leftover turkey and maybe a nice lime mojito, instead of another glass of wine that’s just going to go straight to your middle.”
  
• Add more veg: “When you’re thinking about Christmas food, think red cabbage and squash and sweet potatoes and roasted potatoes. There can be lots of veg involved.”
  
• Get creative with leftovers: “I love leftovers. Christmas is my favourite leftover time, because I will turn everything into another meal. [You can use] the leftover turkey in all kinds of recipes in the book, like the coconut chicken and black bean stew. There’s a recipe for our version of coronation chicken, but we do it in lettuce leaves. You can also use turkey for the chicken, peanut, and noodle salad.
  
• Try new things: “This year, on Christmas Day, I’m definitely making the cavolo nero and sweet potato mash, which is a delicious kind of mash, but it’s also full of things that are really good for you. The other night, I made butternut squash hasselbacks with the roasted red pepper sauce and I can highly recommend it.”
  
• Cocktails — and mocktails — with benefits: “None of us are saints. You have to have a bit of yin and yang in every aspect of your life. That’s why we have a section on cocktails, because we just thought, ‘Look, we’re going to have a drink, so let’s make sure that it’s slightly tempered in to something that’s got some goodness in it as well as the alcohol.’”
• Menoliciousby Mariella Frostrup and Belles Berry, published by DK